Issue Splits ‘Tightknit’ Oregon Community
It’s the kind of small Oregon town where neighbors help out each other, where they take up a collection in a mayonnaise jar at the local cafe to buy flowers for a friend who’s in the hospital.
“It’s a pretty tightknit community,” said Bill Cota, a trucker who has lived in Vernonia nearly all his 51 years. “The community pulls together.”
The past few years, though, the 2,000 residents in this community in Oregon’s coastal mountains 40 miles northwest of Portland have been pulled apart by the issue of drug testing in the local schools.
In the fall of 1991, seventh-grader James Acton decided to try out for the grade school football team. But he refused to submit to a required urinalysis that would test him for amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine and LSD.
He and his parents, Wayne and Judy Acton, felt the test violated James’ Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
Although the school district had no suspicions that the boy was using drugs, it said he couldn’t join the team.
The Actons called the American Civil Liberties Union, and the family filed a federal lawsuit in Portland, a case that has wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Vernonia School District won at U.S. District Court level, arguing that the policy was a necessary effort to reduce student drug use. The rule, adopted in 1989, required all athletes to submit to mandatory drug tests. It was aimed at athletes because the district suspected they were the most frequent offenders and were at greater risk to hurting themselves or others if they were on drugs.
Those who tested positive twice could choose counseling and weekly drug tests or suspension from sports for the next two seasons.
Few of the 125 or so athletes who were subjected to the test joined James in refusing to take it.
They knew, says 17-year-old football player James McLaughlin, that passing the test would show everyone you weren’t using drugs.
“It doesn’t bother me that we have to take it,” McLaughlin said, “because if you aren’t on drugs, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
Some townspeople considered those who wouldn’t take the test to be guilty by default.
“If they don’t want to take it, they obviously have something to hide,” said Dick Titus, a 1981 Vernonia High graduate.
After the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court and ruled that the testing policy was unconstitutional in May 1994, the district made the testing voluntary. This year, about half of the athletes volunteered for it.
Superintendent Ellis Mason said that based on student behavior, making the test voluntary has had a direct effect on drug use.
“People I’ve talked to feel it’s getting worse since we quit,” he said.